Kid Icarus: Uprising review – Pit fighter

Nintendo resurrect one of their oldest franchises, but despite the child-friendly visuals the game beneath is an impressively complex online shooter.

Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS) – angel slayer

We’re not sure we can remember a game so desperate to tug at nostalgic heartstrings as this. It might be over two decades since the last Kid Icarus game but this 3DS revamp doesn’t miss a chance to bring back even the most minor enemies and references, even going as far as displaying the old pixelated versions on the touchscreen to remind you.

In Europe at least this seems something of a wasted effort, given that very few people nowadays are going to remember the original NES game or its even more obscure Game Boy sequel (although both are now on the 3DS’s Virtual Console). More importantly neither were particularly good games in the first place and Nintendo’s reasons for not resurrecting the series until now have seemed obvious.

What’s more this strange new reboot seems like a terrible mistake at first. The originals were a peculiar mishmash of platformer, 2D shooter and vaguely Zelda-esque adventure. Uprising interprets these elements as two distinct gameplay styles: an on-the-rails shooter in the air and a more freeform third person action game on the ground.

Both seem trivially simple at first but it’s not long before they begin to reveal surprisingly hidden depths. In fact nothing in the game is as straightforward as it first appears, including the storyline. The action is narrated almost constantly via spoken dialogue and static images on the touchscreen, and seems at first to be nothing but a collection of bad jokes and child friendly plot points.

And yet there’s a plot twist that sees the original’s vague pilfering of Ancient Greek mythology become unexpectedly engaging. That aside though we do wonder whether the game wouldn’t have been better off as a brand new franchise, with a less silly looking hero and set of enemies. That you’re fighting a giant pair of Groucho Marx glasses or a floating pair of lips doesn’t change the gameplay at all but it does give very much the wrong impression.

The on-rail sections don’t have the complexity or variety of Sin & Punishment but you’re not just controlling a gun sight and have to move main character Pit around the screen to avoid attacks and looming scenery. The strict scoring system rewards precision attacks and punishes mindless blasting, with a charge attack that takes a couple of seconds to wind up.

The visuals here are stunning, with a 3D effect that is far more pronounced than the recent Star Fox 64 3D (which in gameplay terms is otherwise very similar). As the game’s landscapes rush past you the cinematography and music is superb, but there’s variety too with a memorable race through an ocean parted by Poseidon and a retro flat-shaded world that’s oddly reminiscent of Starglider 2.

There is some exploration to the ground sections but they’re limited both by design and the restraints imposed by the control system. When flying you simply point and shoot on the touchscreen, while moving around using the Circle Pad. But on the ground you have to both aim and adjust the camera with the stylus, which constantly threatens to overwhelm both you and the game – particularly in enclosed areas.

You do get used to it, and the fine control creates an unusual mix of lightgun game and third person actioner, but you get a terrible case of claw hand after about 30 minutes of play. To counter this the game is bundled with a plastic stand, onto which you’re supposed to sit the 3DS so you no longer have to hold both it and the stylus. It does its job well but we found it much more difficult to maintain the 3D effect’s sweet spot with the console sat unmoving in front of us.

The Circle Pad Pro is used only to offer support for left-handed players, but can do no more because you still have to aim on the touchscreen. Although we wouldn’t have minded using it for the vehicles (including a tank and a mech), which really do push the limits of the stylus-orientated controls.

It’s an inherently clumsy set-up that requires some skill to master, but it can be done and once you begin to realise the game’s many nuances it’s well worth the effort. In land battles you also have a very satisfying dash move which can be activated just as a projectile is about to hit, but your own attacks automatically change from ranged shots to melee attacks depending on the distance to an enemy.

This is further modified by whether you’re dashing, and in what direction, and an absolutely dizzying arrange of different weapons. There are nine different categories of weapon and many individual examples of each, which can either be collected, paid for with collected hearts, or created by fusing together two existing weapons.

Each favours range, melee or charge attacks and many have special abilities and buffs, such as increasing your speed or the chances of an enemy becoming confused when you hit them. And then there are the special powers which you unlock, that do everything from providing you with a reserve health boost to adding poison attacks or gifting you some invisible landmines.

And if the game seems too easy to justify that sort of complexity there’s a clever ‘intensity’ slider bar for each level, which increases the difficulty and sees you betting hearts on your ability to beat it at that setting. Plus there are often special gates that can only be passed through on an intensity setting of a certain level.

Then there’s the multiplayer, available both online and offline. There are two modes, with Light Vs. Dark essentially a six-player team deathmatch where the death of a player decreases a team energy bar according to the value of the weapon they brought into the match. When the first team’s bar is depleted their last player is transformed into an angel, who then has to be beaten to finish the battle.

There’s also a free-for-all mode and a full range of online features that, while still well below what you’d expect on a home console, show that Nintendo are becoming ever more serious about online play. We’re not sure Uprising will become as popular as Mario Kart 7 but the online is just as good.

Even that’s not it, with a host of other unlockables and extras that quickly expose the fact that the game has been developed by Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai. Not only do the powers work in a similar way to Brawl but there’s an essentially identical system of collectable idols, what amounts to an Achievement system, special jigsaw puzzles to complete, and a whole AR system that uses both the idols and trading cards to battle or pose characters.

It’s a dizzyingly generous array of features, and one of the best value 3DS games so far. It does still seem odd to hang such a core game on the limited appeal of the Kid Icarus name, but while Nintendo’s refusal to create a brand new franchise is questionable the quality of this game is not.

In Short:Far more than meets the eye, the triumph here isn’t the successful return of Kid Icarus but Nintendo’s most involved and nuanced shooter of recent years.

Pros:Both play styles are great fun, with an engaging single-player and a host of weapons and upgrades that add a lot of depth. Fully featured multiplayer and mountains of unlockables.

Cons:The game does the best it can with the setting and characters but they’re still pretty lame and didn’t deserve resurrecting. Land battle controls are inherently clumsy.